The Lesser Dead

New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live - and die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody - he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city's sidewalks.

Between Two Fires

The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm - that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon.

The Necromancer's House

Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.

Little Heaven: A Novel

From electrifying horror author Nick Cutter comes a haunting new novel, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Stephen King's It, in which a trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a young woman for a deceptively simple task: check in on her nephew, who may have been taken against his will to a remote New Mexico backwoods settlement called Little Heaven. Shortly after they arrive, things begin to turn ominous.

Hex

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened, or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

The Last Days of Jack Sparks

It was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he'd already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed. Then there was that video: 40 seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet it was posted from his own YouTube account. Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed - until now.

The Troop

Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip - a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfre. The boys are a tight-knit crew. There’s Kent, one of the most popular kids in school; Ephraim and Max, also well-liked and easygoing; then there’s Newt the nerd and Shelley the odd duck. For the most part, they all get along and are happy to be there - which makes Scoutmaster Tim’s job a little easier.

Ararat

Christopher Golden's Ararat is the heart-pounding tale of an adventure that goes wrong - on a biblical scale. When an earthquake reveals a secret cave hidden inside Mount Ararat in Turkey, a daring, newly engaged couple are determined to be the first ones inside...and what they discover will change everything. The cave is actually a buried ancient ship that many quickly come to believe is Noah's Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses.

The Elementals

After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Inside, something deadly lies in wait.

Hell House

For over 20 years, Belasco House has stood empty. Regarded as the Mt. Everest of haunted houses, its shadowed walls have witnessed scenes of unimaginable horror and depravity. All previous attempts to probe its mysteries have ended in murder, suicide, or insanity.

But now, a new investigation has been launched, bringing four strangers to Belasco House in search of the ultimate secrets of life and death. A wealthy publisher, brooding over his impending death, has paid a physicist and two mediums to establish the facts of life after death once and for all. For one night, they will investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townsfolk refer to it as the Hell House.

Black Mad Wheel: A Novel

The Danes - the band known as the "Darlings of Detroit" - are washed up and desperate for inspiration, eager to once again have a number one hit. That is until an agent from the US Army approaches them. Will they travel to an African desert and track down the source of a mysterious and malevolent sound? Under the guidance of their front man, Philip Tonka, the Danes embark on a harrowing journey through the scorching desert - a trip that takes Tonka into the heart of an ominous and twisted conspiracy.

The Fisherman

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there, the remedy to both their losses, they dismiss it as just another fish story.

Cold Moon over Babylon: Valancourt 20th Century Classics

Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy Alabama small town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: 14-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law. But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror.

Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors

In ghastly harmony with the nightmarish visions of the award-winning writer's novels, these stories blend a lifelong appreciation of horror culture with the grotesque fascinations and childlike terrors that are the author's own.

Disappearance at Devil's Rock: A Novel

Late one summer night, Elizabeth Sanderson receives the devastating news that every mother fears: Her 13-year-old son, Tommy, has vanished without a trace in the woods of a local park. The search isn't yielding any answers, and Elizabeth and her young daughter, Kate, struggle to comprehend Tommy's disappearance. They feel helpless and alone, and their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration: The local and state police have uncovered no leads.

The Folcroft Ghosts

When their mother is hospitalized, Tara and Kyle are sent to stay with their only remaining relatives, their grandparents. It's their first time meeting May and Peter Folcroft. The elderly couple seem friendly at first, and the house, hidden in the base of the mountains, is full of nooks to explore.

Bird Box: A Novel

Something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remain, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, Malorie has long dreamed of fleeing to a place where her family might be safe. But the journey ahead will be terrifying: 20 miles downriver in a rowboat blindfolded with nothing to rely on but Malorie's wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. And something is following them....

Lurk

College student Drew Brady never wanted the power to spy on his friends. But late one night, he finds a box of old Polaroids buried under his house that can change to show him whatever he desires, and Drew finds himself with the power to watch the people around him without them ever knowing.

The Haunting of Ashburn House

There's something wrong with Ashburn House. The ancient building has been the subject of rumours for close to a century. Its owner, Edith, refused to let guests inside and rarely visited the nearby town. Following Edith's death, her sole surviving relative, Adrienne, inherits the property. Adrienne's only possessions are a suitcase of luggage, 20 dollars, and her pet cat. Ashburn House is a lifeline she can't afford to refuse. Adrienne doesn't believe in ghosts, but it's hard to ignore the unease that grows as she explores her new home.

Final Girls: A Novel

Ten years ago college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to - a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls.

The Darkening

"Where has everyone gone?" That's the question 15-year-old Annabelle 'Birdy' Finch is asking. As a 100-year storm descends on Los Angeles, Birdy's not the only one looking for answers to the city's vanishing population. A wheelchair-bound Army veteran watches the world from his apartment window, and what he sees terrifies him. An LA detective has two missing patrol cops, a bloody crime scene, but no bodies. A desperate mother will stop at nothing in her search to find her missing daughter.

The Devil Crept In

Young Jude Brighton has been missing for three days, and while the search for him is in full swing in the small town of Deer Valley, Oregon, the locals are starting to lose hope. They're well aware that the first 48 hours are critical and after that, the odds usually point to a worst-case scenario. And despite Stevie Clark's youth, he knows that, too; he's seen the cop shows. He knows what each ticking moment may mean for Jude, his cousin and best friend.

Carrion Comfort

The Past...Caught behind the lines of Hitler’s Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp. Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face-to-face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazis themselves...

A Winter Haunting

A once-respected college professor and novelist, Dale Stewart has sabotaged his career and his marriage - and now darkness is closing in on him. In the last hours of Halloween, he has returned to the dying town of Elm Haven, his boyhood home, where he hopes to find peace in isolation.

Publisher's Summary

Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate - the Savoyard Plantation - and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice. It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard still stand. Where a longstanding debt of blood has never been forgotten. A debt that has been waiting patiently for Frank Nichols's homecoming...

The quality of the recording really messes this up. Toward the end of chapters - over and over - (AND over!) the audio just SKIPS. There is no way to tell how many words or sentences or paragraphs might be missing. Otherwise an interesting and exciting story and great narrator.

Let's start with the plusses - this is a rip-snorting, fast-paced, carefully-crafted thriller in both horror and historical fiction categories. The story is literary, first rate and laid out just right. The narrator was very good, although he seemed to forget that his 3 protagonists were YANKEES in the south, and generally gave them heavy southern inflections as well, No big deal.
***
Now to the not-so-good bits. 39 minutes into the recording it seemed to skip, and while the book is labeled as 9hr6min in length, the download read out at 8hr25min. I contacted Audible and they said they found no problem, and sent me a fresh file, but the problem was the same.

I wound up purchasing the book on Kindle so I could make comparisons! The 39 min. skip turned out to be only a single word, and I resumed listening. But almost every chapter ends with one of these squeaky cuts, where a single word is cut off, and when the book resumes and you're in another chapter, it's very disconcerting. I THINK I heard the entire book, but I hope that Penguin Audio is more careful with its finished products in the future.

This audibook was not of the quality I have come to expect from Audible. There were frequent hiccups - like a CD skipping. The story got started slowly, but by the time I got to the second half of the book, I was glad I stuck with it.

Buehlman's prose is a pleasure to listen to. His descriptive writing is rich and takes you there. His characters are complex and human and deeply engaging. Even his minor characters are fresh and vivid. The setting is eerie, the premise is intriguing. We are all set up for a wonderful walk through the strange, strange south. Then, about two thirds of the way through the book, I get the sense that that someone told the author to quit pissing around and being literary and write a novel just like other horror novels.

Suddenly, many of the characters develop convenient but unconvincing paralysis. The "ones across the river" are disappointingly revealed to be... well, let's just say they're a lot less interesting and more predictable than they could have been.

This is not a bad horror book. But it could have been an outstanding piece of writing and a better horror story. The initial development of delightful creeping dread reveals itself to be less than the potential of the story promised.

All this said, I'm only so critical because for the first three quarters, it's just brilliant.

It has been a long time since any audio-book has kept my wife and me mesmerized. We listened to the entire story straight though and I must say it was fantastic. The author does a superb job of foreshadowing, letting the listener know something is terribly evil in the woods across the river. Buehlman, as the author, does not say anything directly about the woods across the river. Frank questions various members of a group of people he has become friends with. None of them want to speak of the woods and this leads Frank to investigate the forest on his on. Then we slowly learn of unspeakable horrors through Franks obsession about the forest. The town has always released hogs into those woods, with each farm rotating the release's. Frank is puzzled by this ritual, but can learn nothing about why the town makes these sacrifices. Once the town decides not to make it's yearly sacrifice of pigs the arc of the story soars and the listener is pulled into an appalling nightmare.

Buelman's 'Those Across The River' was a real find for me. I can't remember who turned me on to it, but I am so glad I listened to it. There were a few problems with some sentences ending to abruptly, but not enough to abandon this most exquisite tale of terror in small town Georgia.

Eudora and Frank Nichols have moved to a sleepy town in the south so that they could start fresh in a home they inherited from Frank's aunt. Frank's aunt does warn them that things aren't 'quite right' with the house, and tells them to sell it right away and not to live in it.

The couple is looking for a way to get back on their feet, so they decide, against any caution, to move into the home. The townspeople seem fairly nice but much too 'Southern Like.' The setting takes place after World War I and the author does a great job in painting a post war picture.

Strange and terrible things start to happen in the town when a child is ripped to shreds and eaten. When a bunch of bodies are dug up and pieced back together at the local high school, terror runs like a high fever and the townspeople start to fear for their very lives. They have one thing to focus on and worry about- They've upset 'Those Across The River.'

This book is an excellent thrill ride filled with voluminous relationships, gentle and kid flowing prose, and some fascinating, loving and memorable characters. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who likes a good thrill, and good literature at the same time. Don't let the few hiccups in the recording bother you!

I almost passed on this book based on the comments concerning the audio problems. There is certainly the occasional clipped word, but they are few and far between. I didn't find it distracting, and missed none of the story.<br/><br/>It's tough to say too much without saying too much, if you know what I mean. From a writing perspective, it's always great when an author who can string a nice sentence together ventures into this genre. That's what we have here. The writing is descriptive and lends atmosphere without ever detracting from the story line. Very well done.<br/><br/>The narrator gets top marks, too. The cast of characters could have easily overwhelmed a lesser performer, but he nails it!

This is one scary book. I really enjoyed it. I love to listen to scary stories, especially when I am home alone! This one was a good one! I really like the way the mystery builds and instills a sense of fright, making you want to yell "run, stupid".

I am currently listening to this book for a second time. The story sneaks up on you in a way that absolutely forces you to keep listening. The setting is perfect for the horror that slowly unfolds and with the combination of the talented voice actor and the incredibly believable writing of the author it is a story that will stick with you for a long time.

Any additional comments?

Only problem I had was that there seemed to be something wrong with the recording. Throughout the audio sentences seemed to be clipped off at the end and words to complete sentences seem to have been lost.

I felt unease from the first few minutes listening to this story. It took a bit of listening to place it in time. I guess if I had looked at the Publisher's Summary I would have seen that it was 1939, but I didn't so I had to try to figure it out, which I did eventually.

At first the unease is in the relationship between Frank and Eudora. The author does a good job to give you a sense that there is something off about the relationship, and you discover later that the start of their relationship has created chaos and trauma for them both.

Then there is Whitbrow, and that place is odd and so many things make you uneasy that you know something is going on. The town has a strange ritual of sending pigs across the river as a sacrifice and when they decide it's a silly ritual and to stop, things go haywire.

A good horror story makes me uncomfortable as this one did. There is one scene towards the end that still makes me a little ill thinking about it, but it is what the one thing that allows Frank to make a decision about what he is going to do and is crucial to the story.

Well written, nice prose, and a sense of unease that blooms into terror. What more could you want from a horror novel?